Our two-part series exploring where AMD went wrong took 140 drafts and lots of work.

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Last week we introduced our new Week in Review, which will showcase some of the best stories from the week and how they were made, as well as some of the best comments beneath the stories. Let's start with our two-part series from Cyrus Farivar and Andrew Cunningham.

Many of our readers noted how thorough the two articles were, and we can say for a fact that this series took our two authors a long time and a lot of phone calls. Farivar and Cunningham started gathering information for the story in February. The two found interviewees through word of mouth mostly. "It was sort of an interconnected spiderweb of interviewees," Cunningham says. "I called up someone I had met at CES to talk with him, and he referred me to other people who referred me to other people. And I think it was the same for Cyrus. He'd find a former employee through LinkedIn or something, and that person would have a name or two for us to investigate."

When the story was written, it went to editors Nate Anderson and Eric Bangeman for finesse. "Fun fact about the first draft, though," Cunningham told us, "was that it was 3,000 or 4,000 words longer than what eventually got published on the site. It was... a labor-intensive edit. Many darlings were murdered I think." Between the two articles, this editor counted 140 saved versions before the articles went live.

Our readers reacted pretty passionately too. ZerofaithX263 wrote, "I used to be a huge AMD fanboy, I loved rooting for the underdog and getting better price to performance. It wasn't actually the performance gap that finally made me quit though... it was multiple horrible experiences with their customer service." issor went unopposed in upvotes when he commented in part one "Can't wait for part 2. We all owe AMD for x86_64." And morfinx seemed to capture a common sentiment when he wrote:

"My own story is very much related to the story of AMD. Growing up, AMD has always been my favorite company and my dream job. Something about a scrappy little company that is 'sticking it to the man' really resonated with me. It had such a profound effect on me that it influenced my interests and studies in engineering. In the mid-2000s, after grad school, I started working at AMD. It is not until earlier this year that I decided to move on. Still, AMD holds a special place in my heart and I wish it success in the future."

After the second half of the series published, some former employees of AMD took to the comments section to give their two cents. carrelk, a former AMD employee wrote: "Good article, but the conclusion is optimistic by omission. AMD is failing where it is, so the grass is greener elsewhere. In this article the elsewhere is in servers, the one place where AMD had a day in the sun a decade ago. Unfortunately AMD hasn’t had differentiating IP for server products in years, so the only value-add has been cheap-cheap-cheap in a market where the CPU is a small fraction of the end-product cost."

Another self-identified former employee, sidran32, wrote "As a former employee, I am really sad to see that AMD is stumbling so profoundly. I do believe they had a great idea (with Fusion) and that if they were able to execute it would have really taken off much more quickly. I still am cautiously hopeful that they'll turn themselves around. It's incredibly important to have them in the market as a competitive force against Intel. Also, I love AMD GPUs and hope to see them continue to stick around."

Odds and ends

This week, representative Rob Goodlatte (R-VA) announced that he plans to open a comprehensive review into the state of Copyright Law in America. In honor of that announcement, Timothy B. Lee wrote Congress some suggestions with Five ways Congress should improve the copyright system. Many readers liked Lee's suggestions, but some took exception with his final recommendation: that the US create a mandatory database of copyrighted works.

Reader mcherm wrote "To give a simple example, I write articles for my blog. Probably no one reads them, but I write them anyway. I would prefer if publishers had to ask me before reprinting those articles (anyone? I'd be happy to work something out!). I take pictures—mostly for my own enjoyment. I wouldn't really mind if someone wanted to use my pictures as illustrations in their PowerPoint presentation, but I'd kind of like to know about it. Copyright law allows me to do these things..."

awarnok agreed, "I have over 400 images over two sites. Admittedly, I'm not that great of an artist, so the likelihood of them being used is virtually nil. Still, that's $400+ to make sure that I retain the copyright of those images, and I have to register any images before I put them online to make sure that others don't just download it and stick it on a t-shirt."